Year in review/books: Histories, real or re-imagined, top year's list

Sunday

Entertaining and thought-provoking aptly describe the best work in literature.

Dispatch book reviewers Nancy Gilson, Margaret Quamme and Peter Tonguette share some of their favorites of the year.

FICTION

• “A Column of Fire” (Viking) by Ken Follett: Fact and fiction mix in the third installment in Follett’s Kingsbridge series. Here, the young English nobleman Ned Willard leads a large cast of characters in 16th-century England, when brutal conflict raged between Protestants and Catholics. Follett’s writing in the epic historical fiction novel (spanning the years 1558 to 1620) can be clunky and sometimes sound too contemporary, but the big tale moves as swiftly and vigorously as one imagines the flagships of her majesty’s navy moved to protect England. — Nancy Gilson

• “Anything Is Possible” (Random House) by Elizabeth Strout: Intersecting stories connect the lives in a small Illinois town in a moving sequel to “My Name Is Lucy Barton.” — Margaret Quamme

• “La Belle Savage” (Knopf) by Philip Pullman: Lyra Belacqua, Pullman’s heroine from “His Dark Materials” trilogy, is back — but as a 6-month-old baby and the focus of a battle between proponents of reason and free speech and a totalitarian religious government. The novel’s hero, 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead, becomes Lyra’s great protector in a harrowing journey (in the canoe of the book’s title) over a flooded fantasy landscape. — N.G.

• “Lincoln in the Bardo” (Random House) by George Saunders: Ghosts quarrel, console each other and interfere with the thoughts of Abraham Lincoln as he visits his dead son in a Washington crypt in Saunder’s compassionate, experimental first novel. — M.Q.

• “See What I Have Done” (Atlantic Monthly) by Sarah Schmidt: The 19th-century ax murder of Lizzie Borden’s father and step-mother is re-imagined in this vividly sensory, claustrophobic and sometimes darkly humorous novel. — M.Q.

• “Trajectory: Stories” (Alfred A. Knopf) by Richard Russo: Even when Russo (known for “Nobody’s Fool” and “Empire Falls”) writes short stories, he writes them long. The four long stories collected here do not read as padded vignettes or notes for future novels. Instead, Russo fashions tales compact enough to make an immediate impression but rich enough to sustain interest. — Peter Tonguette

NONFICTION

• “Between Them: Remembering My Parents” (Ecco) by Richard Ford: In an absorbing memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ford perceives his late parents Parker and Edna in enigmatic terms. Among the many topics the writer remains uncertain about is whether his parents fully welcomed the arrival of their only child. Undeterred, Ford poses a plethora of questions. Perhaps it is the novelist in him that inspires him to fill in the blanks. — P.T.

• “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” (Norton) by Dan Egan: Journalist Egan’s deep knowledge of current controversies facing the Great Lakes informs his crisp, lively history of human intervention in them. — M.Q.

• “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” (Doubleday) by David Grann: In his exceptional nonfiction book, Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, details the conspiratorial crimes against the Osage Indian nation in the 1920s — how specific families were targeted and the rights to their land passed to wealthy or prominent Oklahomans — and how a former Texas Ranger and the fledgling FBI cracked the case. — N.G.

• “Leonardo da Vinci” (Simon and Schuster) by Walter Isaacson: This sumptuously illustrated volume makes good use of thousands of pages of da Vinci’s notebooks as well as reproductions of his works to tell the story of the scientist and artist. — M.Q.

• “No One Cares About Crazy People” (Hachette) by Ron Powell: A searing account of the recent history of the treatment of mental illness in the United States, combined with a memoir of Powell’s two sons, both of whom suffered from schizophrenia. — M.Q.

• “Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) by Nancy Schoenberger: In a top-notch book about the Western movies of John Wayne and John Ford, Schoenberger offers an insightful, enthusiastic appraisal of the lives and careers of each, including on-set anecdotes and sharp critical observations. — P.T.

• “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult” (Simon & Schuster) by Bruce Handy: The contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a father of two took on the delightful task of revisiting classic children’s books. His insightful, multi-sourced series of essays is unashamedly biased toward his favorite authors and illustrators — Beatrix Potter, Margaret Wise Brown, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Beverly Cleary and E.B. White among them. — N.G.

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